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The article is confusing, but it seems like the fine is actually $16.03 million. What is infuriating is this is a settlement agreement so that the state will not release the names of the donors. It looks as if they are basically paying off the state so they don't have the deal with the public fallout.

There is a lot of tax payer funded research that is inaccessible to the public despite their hand in its creation. I think that this aspect needs to be discussed, as well.

I don't even see anything to discuss. Seriously, how the hell is this acceptable?

And Swartz's super serious multi-felony crime was trying to fix this situation? Every time I look back at this case, it befuddles me. The only insane people here are the prosecution, and they need to be called out on it and punished along with everyone involved in this travesty of justice.

You are seriously using the GPL in an argument on why copyright is a good idea? The GPL is designed to use to use copyright to subvert its fundamental purpose! Instead of saying "you can not sure", GPL says "you MUST share". It goes against every argument the copyright minimalists make the purpose for copyright is. That's why it's called a "copyleft license", it turns copyright on its head.

Efficency is were wealth comes from. If everyone is breaking windows the economy will grid to a standstill, there has to people doing actual productive work and software is an important foundation to modern world and shouldn't be squandered or guildified in the name of jobs. I appricate that you don't BS about your motives though.

Anyway as long as there is people still working there will be work for software engineers, actually our job is to put other people out of jobs (regardless of license of the software). I really think "software engineer" will be the last job in existence once we have automated everything else.

Anytime you write software that makes people more productive or automate business processes, you are taking a step down that road.

You can implement reliable transmission over UDP. And you have more options as well: you can do it with error correction algorithms for latency intorelent applications, something TCP can't provide with it's ARQ design.

TCP is simple to use (from the view of someone doing network programming), but under the scenes it is crazy complicated to implement properly.

Fortunately you really only need someone to implement a TCP stack once (in open source) and it can be reused in a multitude of operating systems. BSD pretty much set the standard for a TCP/IP stack (TCP Reno) and everyone went from there.

Stream protocols that offer error, flow and congestion control over heterogeneous datagram networks are NOT trivial.

TCP is not trivial at all. In fact & efficient algorithms to implement features of TCP is still an area of active research. IETF RFCs in various stages of standardization related to TCP probably amount to thousands of pages at this point, and it's still growing. Linux recently got a new algorithm for congestion control for instance: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rhee/export/bitcp/cubic-paper.pdf